Hotlinking is an expression which represents the addition of images on a given Internet site via direct links. If you have website A, for instance, and somebody creates site B and wishes to include a couple of images from your site, they can either save the images and then include them on their Internet site or they can simply place links on their website to the images on yours. Thus, whenever a visitor opens Internet site B, site B will steal traffic from your own Internet site A, as the images shall load straight from your website hosting account. This approach is usually used for documents and other sorts of files also. If you want to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own hosting account’s resources, you can restrict their capability to use direct links to your files on their Internet sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting

Because our shared website hosting plans come with a simple and handy hotlink protection tool, you'll be able to shield your content from displaying on third-party sites with literally only 2 clicks, even if you don't have much experience with this kind of matters. The tool comes with the Hepsia hosting Control Panel and once you open it, you'll just need to pick the domain or subdomain you want to protect. Optionally, you can also select if the hotlink protection will be active for the default domain root folder or just for a subfolder. You won't need to do anything else, since our system shall create an .htaccess file automatically inside the preferred location and will include the required code within it. All sites with enabled hotlink protection will be listed inside the same section, so you can easily disable this service for any of them with a mouse click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you open a semi-dedicated server account and you find out that another person is linking to your files without your authorization, you may easily cut them off by activating the hotlink security feature we provide. While the regular way to do that is to set up an .htaccess file, we've got a special tool which can easily do this automatically and you'll simply have to pick the website in question and to choose whether our system should create the needed file inside the main folder or in a subfolder. The tool is a component of our customized Hepsia Control Panel and offers the exact same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it without any problems even if you have never used any web hosting service before. You'll be able to disable the hotlink protection function for any website/folder with a click through the exact same section.